Story: The New Zealanders

Page 5 – Maorilanders

Australasians

After the advent of the Liberal government, another public
event that helped New Zealanders define themselves was the
opportunity of federation with Australia. Many of New
Zealand’s 19th-century migrants had come via Australia, and
some were Australian-born. Like Australians, New Zealanders
were ‘colonials’ and sometimes even ‘Australasians’.

Federation

At the end of the 19th century, as Australia moved towards
federating the separate colonies of Australia, New Zealanders
decided to go it alone. There were many reasons for this. Old
distinctions of a hot continent versus a bracing island
environment, and convict stock versus New Zealand’s ‘chosen
people’, were raised again. But the major factor was the
1,200 miles (1,931 kilometres) across the Tasman Sea which
provided, in politician Sir John Hall’s words, 1,200 reasons
against joining the federation. Another significant
consideration was the different treatment of Māori that was
likely to follow union with Australia. The place of Māori in
New Zealand identity became an important point of
distinction.

New Zealand as Maoriland

Australians were also searching for a sense of national
character, which they found in the ‘bush legend’ about the
hard-bitten people of the outback. The Bulletin
magazine became the famous vehicle for this legend. The
Bulletin had extensive coverage of New Zealand
topics under the heading ‘Maoriland’. This was partly because
there were a few Europeans in New Zealand who saw their
identity as growing out of Māori tradition. Rather than
advocating the adoption of Māori language and rituals, they
believed that Māori legends could provide an instant history
for newcomers, and that Māori could make, as the novelist
Arthur Adams wrote, a contribution to ‘the New Zealand race
of the future’ in the form of ‘a physique and a vitality that
belong to primitive things’.1

Such a vision was possible, not only because the Māori
population was by 1900 under 50,000 and posed no military
threat to Pākehā
dominance, but also because some intellectuals believed Māori
had peculiarly Anglo-Saxon qualities. They were seen as
warriors, sailors and poets – a people, the journalist James
Cowan noted, ‘whose love of the sea and pride in deeds of
battle show strangely close affinity to some of the dominant
traits of the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic race’2.

The Aryan Māori

In 1885 Edward Tregear, amateur ethnographer and later a
leading public servant, published The Aryan Maori,
in which he used linguistic evidence in an attempt to show
that Māori were descended from people who had spread east
from the Caucasus in south-east Europe, just as others
moved west into Europe. In his interpretation, the Aryan
race was reunited in New Zealand as Māori and Europeans
mingled.

Such thinking was never universal in New Zealand, but
strengthened the view that ‘our Maoris’ should be included as
‘honorary whites’ among the rest of the population. In 1901
the women’s suffrage leader Kate Sheppard said, ‘Maori and
Pakeha have become one people, under one Sovereign and one
Parliament, glorying alike in the one title of “New
Zealander”’.3

One people

As for Māori, many never considered themselves part of the
‘one people’ proclaimed by William Hobson at the signing of
the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. The ‘amalgamation’ practised
by the missionaries seemed to mean the replacement of Māori
culture by British ‘civilisation’.

From the late 1850s the sense of a separate Māori nation
emerged, finding expression first in the Māori King movement
and later, in the 1890s, in the Kotahitanga (unity) movement,
and the holding of separate Māori parliaments.

During the First World War there were some Māori,
especially those in Waikato, who resisted any suggestion that
they should fight for king and country. Others shared the
view of those such as Te Rangi Hīroa (Peter Buck) who,
addressing the Māori forces on the battlefield at Gallipoli
in Turkey, claimed that ‘we are the old New Zealanders. No
division can be truly called a New Zealand division, unless
it numbers Maoris among its ranks.’ 4 The politician Māui
Pōmare also claimed that the war confirmed the union of Māori
and Pākehā as New Zealanders ‘when their blood co-mingled in
the trenches of Gallipoli’.5

98.12% British

In the 19th century it seemed that the term ‘New
Zealanders’ might exclude Māori. By 1920 few European New
Zealanders understood it this way, although there would
always be Māori who challenged their view. When in 1919 the
politician G. W. Russell described New Zealanders as 98.12%
British, Māori were included in his statistic.6 Meanwhile a
campaign was launched in the early 1920s to abolish the term
‘Australasian’.